A New Family Feeling on Campus

The president of Claremont McKenna College wrote in an e-mail to the community that one role of higher education is to “provide a very special home for our students as a bridge from their families to the truly adult and independent world.”

Photograph by Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times via Getty

I often informally ask my students, at Harvard Law School, what their most important ideals are and how they hope to fulfill them in their lives and careers. In the past several years, I’ve been touched to hear a significant plurality of students name a priority that I didn’t hear much when I began teaching, nearly a decade ago: their close relationships with their parents. As a forty-two-year-old parent myself, I’m gratified by the idea that my own children might feel, as young adults, that our bond was so sustaining as to be central to their visions of their lives. But I’m struck that this theme was not on my agenda when I was a student, twenty years ago, and I don’t recall it being important to my peers, either.

Many observers of the student protests of the nineteen-sixties noted those movements’ Oedipal aspects. That generation of student activists was seen as killing the father (figuratively) in their organized political resistance to university faculty and administration, and, more broadly, to war and oppression. Today’s student protesters are certainly directing anger at faculty and administrators, but this time the parental dynamic is notably different.

Particularly in the way things have unfolded at Yale, students’ social-justice activism has been expressed, in part, as the need for care from authority figures. When they experience the hurt that motivates them to political action, they’re deeply disappointed with parental surrogates for not responding adequately or quickly enough to support and nurture them. The world in which it’s not bizarre for a young person to rebuke someone for failing to “create a place of comfort and home,” or to yell, “Be quiet ... You’re disgusting!,” and storm away, is the world of family, where a child in pain desperately desires empathy and understanding from a parent. The online scorn heaped on the student who was filmed behaving this way represents an unproductive refusal to compassionately translate her behavior across the generational divide. In a piece called “Hurt at Home,” another Yale student wrote, “I feel my home is being threatened,” and contrasted her comforting relationship with her father to the care she felt students emphatically did not receive from the master of Silliman College. Yale tells its students that the residential college is their “home away from home,” but this generation might be the first to insist so literally on that idea.

Almost a year ago, many of us took to the streets for Black Lives Matter protests in the wake of the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, and the failure to indict police for homicides of unarmed black men. When a grand jury refused to indict the officer who caused the death of Eric Garner, protests on Harvard Law School’s campus turned inward, after students waited several days for the administration to e-mail the community recognizing injustice and empathizing with pain. The racial-justice protests then became synonymous with protests against the administration and faculty for our failure to show that we saw the suffering. The national coverage of Harvard and Columbia law students’ requests for exam deferrals, in light of the trauma of shocking events and the exhausting protest activities, painted the students as spoiled and irresponsible. But what I saw was related to what we see today in students’ pleas for care from the adults they want to trust in a world that is genuinely frightening and unjust.

The president of Claremont McKenna College—which has recently seen racial-bias protests, hunger strikes, and a high administrator’s resignation—wrote in an e-mail to the community that one role of higher education is to “provide a very special home for our students as a bridge from their families to the truly adult and independent world.” This formulation is particularly poignant at a time when material independence will be elusive for many college students, who are coming of age during a recession, with onerous debt, and may actually go home to their parents for much of their twenties in order to make ends meet. In the midst of the developing story on campus activism, the horror of mass violence in Paris wrought by ISIS brought us back to our experience of the September 11th attacks, an event seared into the child psyches of current college students, and sufficient to have robbed them of the basic sense of safety that my generation enjoyed. The students’ preoccupation with safe spaces and the comfort of home seems a plausible manifestation of the profound lack of security—from violence to financial insolvency—that their generation faces. No wonder that their calls for social justice return to the talisman of safety and care of parental figures.

The list of concrete demands recently announced by student activists at Yale is decidedly not anti-establishment. They seek more connection with the Man, not less. Many of their calls are for more bureaucracy: the creation of an academic department, the hiring of more employees for cultural centers, and the development of training, surveys, and reporting requirements (borrowed from the now established Title IX school bureaucracy). But it is in the demands for more mental-health services, for stipends and food for students in need during breaks, for dental and optometry care, and for eight financial-aid consultants that we most clearly see their yearning not only for safety but for a safety net. The Million Student March demonstrations at multiple campuses last week, in support of free tuition, cancellation of student debt, and a fifteen-dollar minimum wage for campus jobs, went directly to the point. At Amherst College, the student emphasis is on apologies to current and former students from the president and chancellor for the institutional legacy of everything from white supremacy to cis-sexism to mental-health stigma. These demands for administrative affirmation of students’ needs are far from a rejection of the institution. Instead, they reach for a familial embrace.

What response can be expected from young people who feel their entreaties for recognition are ignored? The Amherst protestors have promised that they will “respond in a radical manner, through civil disobedience” if their demands are not met by November 18th. And then, ominously, they say that continued failure to meet the demands “will result in an escalation of our response.” I am unsure what, beyond radical civil disobedience, they mean to promise, if anything. We should remember that it wasn’t too long ago that campus buildings burned in student protests. But I hope I am right that this generation of students has too much family feeling to be so destructive to the institutions they call home.

Jeannie Suk Gersen is a contributing writer to The New Yorker and a professor at Harvard Law School.